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Reviled by critics and largely ignored by moviegoers when released in 1999,
Random Hearts is a pox on the reputations of Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Sydney Pollack, but it doesn't entirely deserve its lowly fate. The movie's lugubriously paced and its repressed passions are dulled under the weight of relentless melancholy, but Pollack deserves credit for defying the Hollywood Zeitgeist with a mature, substantial film about the power of betrayal to reach beyond the grave.
Ford plays a Washington, D.C. detective; Scott Thomas is a Congresswoman in the midst of a re-election campaign. When their spouses die in a plane crash, the cop is convinced they'd been having an affair, and his obsessive, masochistic quest for the painful truth draws him closer to the Congresswoman despite the mutual risks to their careers and domestic privacy. While she hides behind a façade of denial, his agonized investigation makes him simultaneously unappealing (a risk Ford may have taken as a challenge), sympathetic, and sadly compelling.
Pollack takes his own chances by keeping everything so relentlessly downbeat, but anyone receptive to the story will find that Random Hearts is a subtly rewarding study of tormented adults who've discovered too late the weaknesses of their seemingly stable marriages. It's anything but cheerful, and a subplot involving a corrupt cop (Dennis Haysbert) is a formulaic distraction. But Random Hearts provides welcome relief from dramas that flirt with emotional anguish without delving into its deeper consequences. --Jeff Shannon
Harrison Ford, a gruff, miserable, and violent Washington, D.C., cop, has lost his wife in an airplane crash. Kristin Scott Thomas, a Republican congresswoman, elegant, articulate, and sophisticated, has lost her husband in the same crash. A little investigation on Ford's part yields the unpleasant discovery that the dead spouses were having an affair. Scott Thomas wants to let go; Ford wants to learn everything about the affair as a way of understanding his wife. The two survivors fight, and then make love, but the characters have been so thoroughly established as utterly unlike each other that their affair seems ridiculous. It's as if a bear had taken up with a swan: you want to look away. With Charles S. Dutton as Ford's partner. Directed with professional skill but too slow a tempo by Sydney Pollack, who appears in the movie as a cynical political advisor. Darryl Ponicsan adapted Warren Adler's novel, but the screenplay credit is given to Kurt Luedtke. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
